EPA: Pesticides Linked to Bee Deaths Don’t Protect Soybean Crops

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http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/10/16/epa-pesticide-linked-bee-deaths-doesnt-protect-soybean-crops

Researchers find seeds treated with neonicotinoids are useless at fighting pests.

October 17, 2014 By Todd Woody

American farmers plant soybean seeds coated in pesticides linked to the mass die-off of honeybees on about a third of the 77 million acres that grow the crop in the United States. Now a new study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined just how effective seeds treated with the pesticides, called neonicotinoids, are at controlling pests like the soybean aphid.

Not at all.

“U.S. soybean growers derive limited to no benefit from neonicotinoid seed treatments in most instances,” the authors of the study concluded after analyzing crop and pesticide data. “With regard to specific pest efficacy, there was almost universal agreement that neonicotinoid seed treatments are not typically effective against soybean aphids.”

Studies have implicated neonicotinoids, also called neonics, in the mass die-off of bees that pollinate a third of the global food supply. Those crops are worth $30 billion in the U.S. alone. Many scientists believe the pesticide is one of several interrelated factors—including disease, parasites, and poor nutrition—responsible for the apian catastrophe that has unfolded over the past decade.

“I think it’s the first step in reducing unnecessary use of these products,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an expert in honeybee health at the University of Maryland, said of the EPA study, released Thursday.

“It’s really good that we only use products when we need them,” added vanEngelsdorp, the author of studies that have found that pesticides, fungicides, and other agricultural chemicals lower bees’ resistance to disease.

Neonics are now the most used pesticides in the world, but before 2004 they were rarely sprayed on soybeans. That was the year the EPA approved neonics for soybean seeds. Annual insecticide use on soybeans subsequently soared from an average of 430,000 pounds a year to nearly 4 million pounds by 2008, according to the EPA study.

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